Search results for ""Fairleigh Dickinson University Press""

This book rejects the Calvinist and deconstructionist interpretations of Sidney and argues instead for a man of humane and generous sympathies who thought deeply about human experience and the art and function of writing.

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Willa Cather’s Modernism challenges the assumption that Cather was an old-fashioned exponent of styles of fiction, demonstrating instead that Cather was clearly aware of the experimentation within the modernist movement. Illustrative chapters deal with three central novels: A Lost Lady, The Professor’s House, and My Mortal Enemy.

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"What May Words Say…?" A Reading of The Merchant of Venice contains, in a form resembling a running commentary, a comprehensive and in many respects unconventional interpretation of The Merchant of Venice. The play's development of ideas is unfolded in a literary analysis that focuses on the poet's words in their philological, historical, and philosophical contexts. What the words say is that the play is dominated by the three Delphic maxims, Know thyself, Nothing too much, and Give surety and harm is at hand. Within the intellectual and ethical compass of these tenets the two-stranded action of the play is developed, and the question why Shakespeare added the story of the caskets to the story of the bond is answered by the words law and choice, which are as closely connected semantically as the two stories are interrelated in the dramatic structure. The self-knowledge achieved in the musical cadence of the play is everyone's seeing God's image in the other person, and the law finally chosen is forgiveness.

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Dreamscapes in Italian Cinema explores different representations of dreams, visions, hallucinations, and hypnagogic states in Italian film culture, covering the works of some of the most significant auteurs in the history of Italian cinema (Fellini, Pasolini, Moretti, Bellocchio, among others). Dreams are discussed both in a filmic context, considering the diegetic and formal techniques employed to construct and represent them, and as allegories or metaphors in a broader cultural, political, and social sense (the film industry itself as the proverbial dream factory, and dreams as hopes, aspirations or altogether parallel universes, for example). The book covers works released over different decades and spanning multiple genres (drama, gothic film, horror, comedy), and it is intended to shed light on a topic that is as suggestive as it is insufficiently studied.

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While many works on Hitchcock either openly reject psychoanalysis or utilize it only casually or peripherally, Dial 'M' for Mother: A Freudian Hitchcock is the first book-length study to consistently and systematically apply a Freudian psychoanalytic approach to a number of Hitchcock's major films (Shadow of a Doubt, Rear Window, Vertigo, North by Northwest, Psycho, The Birds, Marnie, Frenzy). Central to this book is the author's analysis of a 'mother complex' that informs not only the major male and female characters of these and other Hitchcock films but their plot, formal structure, and visual, cinematic artistry as well. According to the author, the genius of Hitchcock is inseparable from the director's unrelenting adherence to the 'darker side' of our unconscious fears and fascinations, and in its unwillingness to veil this exploration of the Freudian Unconscious with Hollywood's and society's denial of such truths.

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Bringing together both established and emerging scholars of the long nineteenth century, literary modernism, landscape and hemispheric studies, and contemporary fiction, New Versions of Pastoral offers a historically wide-ranging account of the Bucolic tradition, tracing the formal diversity of pastoral writing up to the present day. Dividing its analytic focus between periods, the volume contextualizes a wide range of exemplary practitioners, genres, and movements: contributors attend to early modernism's vacillation between critiquing and aestheticizing the rise of primitivist nostalgia; the ambiguous mythologization of the English estate by the twentieth-century manor house novel; and the post-national revisiting of the countryside and its sovereign status in contemporary imaginings of regional life.

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In this well-illustrated text, Dr. Denney asserts that the artists who image Diana, Princess of Wales, have framed her according to a cultural memory based on traditions of royal portraiture and according to twentieth-century reassertions (that is, reframings) of the debate over feminism and femininity in visual culture. Art historians and literary critics have examined the visual culture of Queen Victoria, Queen Elizabeth I, Queen Elizabeth II, and more recently, images of women in the court of Charles II, but no one has addressed, as the author does here, the impact of imaging Diana, Princess of Wales, at a time in British culture when feminism and femininity collide. Dr. Denney critiques art historical traditions of portraiture in order to argue that a princess must perform a constructed role of femininity, one that corresponds to Victorian codes of royal protocol, visual practice, and behavior. The book encompasses themes of marriage, motherhood, philanthropy, royal dress, and autobiography. Through an examination of nineteenth- and twentieth-century paintings, photographs, engravings, and popular illustrations, the study engages a comparative visual dialogue on the imaging of royal women. Looking particularly at the nineteenth-century Princess of Wales, Alexandra (born Princess Alexandra of Denmark), the author reveals the persistence of a cultural memory in terms of the proper roles and behaviors of a princess from the nineteenth century to the twentieth century. By looking at portraits of Diana, Princess of Wales, in conjunction with past royal portraits, the study determines that she, like Princess Alexandra before her, is conscious of tradition and employs it as a matter of survival. The book's methods in this regard include an exploration of royal portrait traditions, gender studies, popular journalism, theories on feminist biography and autobiography, as well as costume theory and history to contextualize the representation of Diana, Princess of Wales. How does one address the insistence on

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This is a close textual analysis of Rushdie’s five major novels: Midnight’s Children, Shame, The Satanic Verses, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, and The Moor’s Last Sigh. Rushdie recognizes that practicing identity politics leads to nativism and nationalism, categories he rejects because they merely invert the colonizer/colonized binary, leaving violent hierarchies intact. His impulse is to deconstruct the colonizer/colonized binary and in doing so to clear a `new’ postmodern space. This text employs post-structuralist/ postmodern theory not only to address the issues of representation that Rushdie raises in his major political novels, but also to facilitate a discussion of the manner in which he pushes the boundaries of the modern novel.

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The Stronger Sex, a study of the women in the fiction of Lawrence Durrell, argues that Lawrence Durrell envisioned a new woman, self-confident, free of male domination, and able to serve, direct, and protect her dependent man. Durrell's modern twentieth- /twenty-first-century woman is the center of what Durrell envisions as the new "couple"-woman dependent upon man for completion and man dependent upon the centrality of woman for the essential wisdom and direction and meaning in his life. Far from being a mere follower of D. H. Lawrence, as many have claimed, Durrell came to insist that man must first cede to woman both the personal and social power and freedom which he has throughout history denied her. Only in this way, suggests Durrell, can modern man both find himself and save himself and so discover and fulfill his own being. Thus, all of Durrell's women are the saviors of the lost men who must come to them for human completion. From the women of the early works, such as Panic Spring, The Pied Piper of Lovers, The Black Book, and The Dark Labyrinth, to the Justines, Melissas and Cleas of the Alexandria Quartet, the Benedictas and Iolanthes of The Revolt of Aphrodite, the Constances and Livias of The Avignon Quintet, and Cunegonde of Caesar's Vast Ghost-all of Durrell's lost and ever inadequate men must ultimately find themselves and the meaning of their lives in the women who complete them. Then, paradoxically, and only then, can these same men provide the security, direction, and protection for which their women so desperately search. Thus, in the "couple" both man and woman are completed in their mutual dependence and final self-discovery. The study refers often to the works of previous biographers of Lawrence Durrell: Ian MacNiven, Richard Pine, and Gordon Bowker.

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Kenya's Independence Constitution: Constitution-Making and End of Empire is a narrative of the evolution of the constitution that was put into effect as Kenya's history as a colonial possession came to an end. It details the attempts of the colony's political elite and the British Colonial Office to find a constitutional means to move Kenya to the status of independent state. As this process moved forward, political ethnicity assumed central significance. This produced an environment in which demands for a federal constitution, popularly termed majimbo, came to dominate constitutional discourse. Deep disagreement among Kenya's political elite over this issue marked the remainder of the colonial period. That elite, now represented by the Kenya African National Union (KANU) and the Kenya African Democratic Union (KADU), advocated different constitutional paths to independence. KADU's demands for a majimbo constitution dominated discourse during 1962 and early 1963, but deep disagreement characterized the constitutional negotiations. This resulted in a constitution for self-government (introduced on June 1, 1963) that was regional in character but fell short of a federal system. Almost as soon as it came into existence, this constitution faced pressure for substantial change from KANU, the party that won the 1963 general election. As a result, the British government was forced to make alterations in what became the independence constitution. The latter proved a prelude to the destruction of majimbo a year later. Kenya's Independence Constitution provides the first in-depth description of the final stage of colonial Kenya's constitutional evolution. This book not only provides a detailed account of the process of constitution-making, including definitive treatments of the final two constitutional conferences of 1962 and 1963. Utilizing British and Kenya cabinet papers and secret intelligence reports never featured in earlier accounts, the narrative also destroys many of the myt

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This is a wide-ranging anthology that examines, in chronological order, several genres that have been prominent in the history of Western philosophy. The programmatic introduction outlines the diverse range of genres used by philosophers (dialogue, commentary, biography, etc.) and explains how genre-based exegesis can enrich our analysis and interpretation of philosophical texts. The remaining essays examine individual texts from this perspective.

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In Hitler in the Movies: Finding Der Führer on Film, a Shakespearean and a sociologist explore the fascination our popular culture has with Adolf Hitler. What made him … Hitler? Do our explanations tell us more about the perceiver than the actual historical figure? We ask such question by viewing the Hitler character in the movies. How have directors, actors, film critics, and audiences accounted for this monster in a medium that reflects public tastes and opinions? The book first looks at comedic films, such as Chaplain’s The Great Dictator or Ernst Lubitsch’s To Be or Not to Be (1942), along with the Mel Brooks’s 1983 version. Then, there is the Hitler of fantasy, from trash films like The Saved Hitler’s Brain to a serious work like The Boys from Brazil where Hitler is cloned. Psychological portraits include Anthony Hopkins’s The Bunker, the surreal The Empty Mirror, and Max, a portrait of Hitler in his days in Vienna as a would-be artist. Documentaries and docudramas range from Leni Reinfenstahl’s iconic The Triumph of the Will or The Hidden Führer, to the controversial Hitler: A Film from Germany and Quentin Tarantino’s fanciful Inglourious Basterds. Hitler in the Movies also considers the ways Der Führer remains today, as a ghostly presence, if not an actual character. Why is he still with us in everything from political smears to video games to merchandise? In trying to explain this and the man himself, what might we learn about ourselves and our society?

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Rabbit (Un)Redeemed: The Drama of Belief in John Updikes Fiction offers a selective reading of this prolific authors oeuvre, concentrating on Updikes career-spanning reoccupation with issues of faith and doubt. In Baileys reading, at the heart of Updike's work is the tension between affirming the continuance of the 'heady wine of religious consolation' and the deepening anxiety that the best that humanity can hope for is 'the bleak fare of more endurance.' Focusing on a trio of Olinger stories, the Rabbit Angstrom tetralogy, In the beauty of the Lilies, and Rabbit Remembered, Bailey locates the dialectical situation at the center of Updike's literary career in his conflicted sense of himself as a Christian novelist and Howellsian realist. Bailey's thematically centered study reveals a substantial stylistic component in Updike's dilemma of belief; therefore, a significant objective of this study involves illuminating the author's conflict between creating an eschatologically inspired mimesis reflective of a 'knowing eye' behind appearances of reality, or settling for a historically based realism that, in Howellsian fashion, can do nothing more spiritually meaningful than to record (and thus literally preserve) that which is an will one day be no more. Rabbit Angstrom is Updike's most significant fictional creation, Bailey contends, because his impulses toward religious skepticism are so inadequately possessed of the intellectual and literary buffers that provide Updike and some of his other protagonists with temporary forms of solace or compensation. Rabbit's deepening skepticism that 'goodness lies inside, there is nothing outside' finds it corollary in the evolution delineated in Updike's work, transforming it from the 'song of joy' in affirmation of creation the 'The Blessed Man of Boston' narrator David Kern invokes, to the chronological reconstruction of history as attempted compensation for a relinquished belief in times spiritual significance in In the Beauty of th

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This book discusses the life and career of German Jewish filmmaker Ewald Andre Dupont (1861-1956), as a journalist, screen writer, and director in Berlin, 1913-25, 1931-33, a director at British International Pictures, 1926-31, and a B-movie director in Hollywood, 1925-26, 1933-56. Having apprenticed with Alfred Hitchcock, F. W. Murnau, Ernst Lubitsch, and Fritz Lang in Berlin, where he distinguished himself with Das alte Gesetz (1923) and Variete (1925), Dupont launched his career at 'the British Hollywood' of British International Pictures, where he contributed to the studio's international style, experimented with emergent sound technologies, made the world's first multilingual sound pictures, and, in the most creative phase of his career, directed the feature films Moulin Rouge (1928), Piccadilly (1929), Atlantic (1930), Two Worlds (1931), and Cape Forlorn (1931), which along with Variete, provide the focus of this academic study.

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This edition provides both professional critics and casual readers with a methodical aid to appreciating what the author believes to be the most aesthetically eventful, unobtrusively playful, and undemanding complex long poem of the English Renaissance. Using line-by-line annotation, the edition strives to pay minute and continuous attention to the workings of the poem's dazzlingly protean wit, to its multiple, often breathtakingly artful, internal coherences. While the edition does all the usual work a scholarly annotation is expected to do, it is particularly focused on accomplishing what has not been done by previous Marvell scholarship: laying bare every instance of the poem's dynamic wit. In doing so, it, in particular, alerts Marvell's readers to such, for the most part, non-interpretive, aspects of the poem as associative connections operating on the periphery of one's conscious experience, palpable or merely hinted-at wordplay, coexisting multiple syntaxes, and patterns of formal and informal phonic coherence.

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From her childhood explorations with vivisection through her adult sense that human life was characterized by cyclical encounters with death and disaster, Willa Cather was devoted to making art in the face of violence. Twenty-three critics contribute to the fullest explication to date of Cather, violence, and the arts, exploring thematic representations of violence in war, suicide, sexual trauma, shame, and rage as well as aesthetic responses to violence through literary choreographies and encounters with kind and unkind things.

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This book intends to prove that Lucrezia Marinella should be included in the Italian and European literary canons as a most remarkable contributor, as she excelled in several literary genres: epic, hagiography, poetry, and treatise writing. It also examines the place that Marinella holds within the dominant literary tradition of seventeenth-century Italy as a writer, as well as a woman who lived within a predominantly patriarchal culture. Integrating its values and expectations into her own view of reality, Marinella interprets literary tradition through her perspective by presenting female 'heroines' engaged within the pastoral and epic traditions, the allegorical mode, and the spiritual quest. The purpose of most of her work is to show the 'nobility and excellence' of women and to defend the reputation of women from the slander directed at them by men. Although several articles have been written on various aspects of Marinellas work, a thorough and critical analysis of her most important works,and especially of her last one, together with an assessment of her place in Venetian, Italian, and European womens literary histories, are still missing. This book fills that void.

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This book seeks to assess the emphases and complexities of Albert Camus' lifelong preoccupation with justice within the sociopolitical sphere, against a background of changing personal and historical circumstances. It provides a chronological account of Camus' developing ideas on the concept, as expressed in his non-fiction.

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This book discusses issues of broad cultural consequence by examining the work of three of ItalyOs most prominent living novelists_Umberto Eco, Vincenzo Consolo, and Antonio Tabucchi. It uses an approach that is both historicist and psychoanalytic to address topics in cultural studies and Italian studies

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This book combines subtle readings of eight classic films (Casablanca, Vertigo, The Seventh Seal, Freud, Persona, Children of Paradise, Shakespeare in Love, and 8 ½) with memories and associations that make it possible for both the author and his readers to understand why he sees movies as he does.

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Edith Wharton enjoyed a complex relationship with earlymodernism. On the one hand, as a writer committed to the seriousness of novel writing as an art, her love of French literature and her close relationship with Henry James made her open to experiment. Other elements in her circumstances made her resistant to change. She enjoyed enormous success with The House of Mirth, and the public clearly demanded more from her in this style. That novel's naturalism and didactic purpose, Peel argues, conformed to her own belief in the moral purpose of literature, and ultimately Wharton's reading of politics, culture, and society led her to abandon modernistic experiment for ethical, rather than aesthetic reasons. Apart from Modernism explores the political and cultural influences that helped shape Edith Wharton. Peel examines such subjects as her politics, her relationship to bohemianism and modernist experiment, and her idea of the good society through a discussion of her fiction 1900 - 1915, starting with a survey of the early novellas and novels such as The Valley of Decision, The House of Mirth, and The Fruit of the Tree, before concentrating in detail on the years which saw the publication of The Reef, Ethan Frome, and The Custom of the Country. Important issues such as Wharton's reading of gender, empire, and class form a central part of this discussion. The study emphasizes the crucial role that Wharton's contact with Europe had on her writing, and the significance intellectually and politically of her relationship with Morton Fullerton and her reading of his books on politics. It locates Wharton in her period, surrounded as she was by discourses which called for political and social change, change which an outlook that Peel calls 'American Toryism' made her reluctant to embrace. Her love of motorcars and her excitement about other technological developments such as aeroplanes was inspired by a feeling of exclusivity and not the democratization of culture, whic

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Written by younger as well as by well-established scholars, the essays move quietly away from theoretically dominated criticism, and emphasize the importance of historical criticism, both breaking new ground and recuperating neglected insights and approaches.

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The subjects of the essays in Latin American Shakespeares range from the nineteenth century through the present; from high- to middle- to low-brow stories, plays, films, and poems; from Mexico to Argentina, Chile, Cuba, the U.S. barrio, and diverse sections of Brazil; from artists deservedly famous to artists undeservedly obscure. Shakespeare in Latin America is often implicated in struggles for power - tangentially or directly - and therefore swells the story of world wide political Shakespeare. For Latin American artists, the Shakespearean legacy is available for co-optation not only through parody, adaptation, and both reverent and irreverent (re)creation but also through absorption into unique indigenous genres. Rick J. Santos in his introduction writes of mestizo Shakespeare - mixed as are the native, colonial, and immigrant populations throughout Latin America. In part 1, Jose Roberto O'Shea queries whether the father of Brazilian theatre can be an impresario who performed Shakespeare rather than encouraging native writers. Roberto Ferreira da Rocha explores how a planned political statement against a military dictatorship failed to make its point. Jesus Tronch-Perez discusses the independence of two adaptors of Hamlet who push the view of the inactive prince to its limits. Gregary J. Racz explains how Pablo Neruda acted upon his understanding of Romeo and Juliet as an exemplar of his views about society. Juan J. Zaro explores political exile Leon Felipe's spiritual rather than political approach. Catherine Boyle examines the translation of Lear by Nicanor Parra during the transitional period after the fall of the Pinochet dictatorship. Margarida Gandara Rauen offers a close-up view of Guilherme Schiffer Duraes's transgressive use of Caliban. In part 2, Grace Tiffany explores Borges's oeuvre widely and deeply, confirming the fiction writer's fascination with the poet-playwright. Jose Luiz Passos clarifies the debt of Brazilian realist novelist Joaquim Maria Machado de

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This study explores the overlooked themes of sexuality, gender, and power in Iris Murdoch's fiction, particularly the interplay of power, gender, and sexuality in her characters' personal and social relationships. Gender and sexuality were important topics for Murdoch to consider in her fiction because her views on aesthetics and philosopy were integral to her representation of these themes. Accordingly, Murdoch's representation of gender and sexuality demonstrates her preoccupation with realism and morality, as well as her insistence on individual autonomy and freedom of choice. Since she so vividly depicts the effect of social forces upon the lives of homosexuals and women, her fiction is aligned with social constructionist theory, which maintains that gender and sexuality are shaped by social, cultural, and historical forces. While Murdoch cannot ultimately be classified as a feminist writer, because of her illustration of the social pressures women face, her representation of women bears resemblance to Simone de Beauvoir's often quoted statement: 'One is not born, but rather becomes a woman.' The fiction reveals that Murdoch was especially troubled with the impact social forces had upon individuals who might be socially marginalized because of their genders or sexualities, namely those who display 'nonnormative' gender or sexual behaviors. The author believed that marginalized individuals - like any human beings - needed to cultivate their own 'inner lives' in order to interact properly with their communities, but equally she challenged social prejudices about gender and sexuality by asserting that the community's views on the 'nonnormative' were unloving and morally unjust. In addition to depicting the power of society to impose expectations on individuals of a certain gender or sexual orientation, Murdoch illustrates the notion that power is obtained through knowledge one gains about another's sexual secrets, especially secrets about homosexuality and incest. The study demonstrates that while Mur

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This book argues that within Germanic paganism, considered not as mere cult but as a system of beliefs, it is possible to identify a conceptually coherent understanding of fate which detaches that idea from time, and connects it instead with an implicit theses about the nature of truth as written. Germanic cosmogony, as represented in such precise images as a world-tree, provides a context for an analysis of specific metaphors for the workings of fate as woven or spun by such figures as the Nornsthe Norse goddesses of destiny. Employing both philosophical and mythic-linguistic considerations, this book also offers new insights into the persistence of a residual paganism in the understanding of fate following the Christian conversion.

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Like its 1997 predecessor, Francophone Women Film Directors: A Guide is both a teaching tool and a directory for use by scholars and students of film and literature. Unique among guides dealing with film, both for its breadth and for the very fact that it is devoted exclusively to francophone women throughout the world, most of whom are omitted from other directories and studies, this guide contains listings of some three hundred francophone women filmmakers and their films. Whenever possible, dates, brief biographies, descriptions, and brief critical analyses are included. Themes studied include such subjects as abortion, pornography, prostitution, and mother-daughter relationships. A list of film sources and an extensive bibliography, and an index of geographical subdivisions, maximize the directory's usefulness.

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his volume studies representations of seduction by two nineteenth-century writers whose works paint intersecting pictures of French society during the Restoration and July Monarchy, highlighting both continuities and discontinuities between Ancien Regime and postrevolutionary literature and society. The realm of seduction - where forces of desire, power, and sex converge - provides a focal point for Schocket's analysis of gender stereotypes and their subversions, the ties between the sexual drive and the desire for self-affirmation and power over another, and the factors such as class and sex that shape one's identity and ability to influence others. Through its examination of Balzac's and Sand's representations of seduction from the perspectives of feminism, psychoanalysis, and cultural studies, this book sheds light on erotic relations and the ways in which they are embedded in wider issues of subjectivity and political and social structures.

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Theatre Neapolitan Style introduces five one-act plays by Eduardo De Filippo to English-speaking readers and audiences for the first time. Both individually and collectively, these works bring into clear focus the atmosphere and environment of pre- and post-World War II Naples. At the same time they offer the reader/spectator startling glimpses into unforgettable lives and situations glimpses that record De Filippos favorite emblems with marvelous clarity: a Neapolitan setting; a Neapolitan family; a Neapolitan commedia figure. We witness the playwrights uncanny ability to mix comic and tragic elements simultaneously as romantic courtship prevails despite poverty and infirmity in Philosophically Speaking; a tired marriage and the temptation of youthful flirtation oppose each other in Gennareniello; a government clerk happens upon the demolition of his childhood home in So Long, Fifth Floor; an old actor fantasizes about performing a major role once again in The Part of Hamlet; and a tired salesman learns that his room has been used for the laying out of his deceased landlord in Dead People Aren't Scary. De Filippos one-acts are a gift to theater scholars and practitioners alike. There are hidden blueprints to be discovered in these plays of character, of plot, and of theme that anticipate his longer and more celebrated works. The reaction of one American actor after performing in a staged reading of Gennareniello applies to the others as well: 'The play reveals itself through many layers. It is an actors dream; the deeper meanings and suggestions flow out with each new encounter with the work.'

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This is the first book-length study of the six travel narratives published by the 1989 winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature.

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Converse in the Spirit is a comparative study of the writings of William Blake and the German visionary philosopher Jacob Boehme. It argues that the relationship between Blake and Boehme was a meeting of like minds that transcended place and time, that each regarded himself as part of a community of vision, and aspiration, and believed that any predominant form ofthought and understanding was only partial.

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This is the biography of a man who, by virtue of his excellent Civil War record, became President GrantOs Secretary of War only to fall willingly into the corruption of Washington society and of two wives who demanded social prominence.

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This book studies the persecution of Italian Jews during the Fascist period in relation to the Italian cultural tradition. It studies MussoliniOs anti-Semitic laws, Italian support for HitlerOs war, and anti-Judaic characterizations in the Christian tradition, in Dante, and in other Medieval and Renaissance authors.

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This is a critical study of French and British art and written texts (poetry, literature, travel accounts, art criticism)—orientalist works about the harem produced in the period from 1800-1875. Original readings are provided for over 150 harem pictures, from well-known salon paintings to rarely published erotic popular prints and book illustrations. Multiple Wives, Multiple Pleasures examines these works closely, often establishing fresh contexts for many of the more well-known nineteenth century harem pictures, and often providing a consideration of lesser-known harem pictures that have been rarely published until now.

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This is a comprehensive critical edition of Eliza’s Babes, a text which has not been republished since its appearance in 1652. It supplies readers with an original-spelling copytext derived from the two extant originals. The copytext is preceded by a substantial introduction in which the editor explains the form and function of the text and defines the religiopolitical position of the author, as well as showing her aesthetic tastes and influences. There follows a comprehensive commentary section that supplies textual notes and extensive contextual material for Eliza’s poems and prose meditations.

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Some of Mencken’s most interesting letters were written to George Sterling, a pupil of Ambrose Bierce. The correspondence—which survives nearly intact on both sides—covers a wealth of subjects, including Mencken’s editorship of the Smart Set (1914-23) and American Mercury (1924-26), mutual colleagues (Bierce, Theodore Dreiser, Jack London, Sinclair Lewis), and most entertainingly, each author’s flagrant flouting of Prohibition as well as Sterling’s carnal adventures with a variety of women in California. These letters shed a vivid light on the literary, political, social, and cultural temper of the Jazz Age.

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This is the first book-length study of James Pierrepont Greaves, the mystic, idealist, and sacred socialist. It explores the effects of his teaching on his very disparate followers and particularly on the community, Alcott House, he established. The bookOs chapters on Sophia Chichester, the ultraradical supporter of Greaves, will be of particular interest to feminists.

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This work is intended both as a teaching tool and as a reference for film and literature courses. It contains a list of three hundred francophone women directors from all over the world, and the titles of their films. Dates, descriptions, and critical comments on many of the films are included, as well as a glossary of film terms, questions for film analysis, sample syllabi, and an extensive bibliography.

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Zen Buddhism and the Chaos theory are used in this work as binocular lenses to examine the existential difficulties in Samuel Beckett’s plays in terms that circumvent traditional Western schools of thought. No-Thing Is Left to Tell examines Waiting for Godot, Endgame, Happy Days, Footfalls, and Ohio Impromptu, discovering both within them and throughout the larger scale of Beckett’s plays as a whole, a movement toward revisioning our world in terms of a nonclosed, unself-conscious state. Illustrated.

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This work contributes to the current debate between traditional humanist approaches to Shakespeare and newer modes of analysis informed by Marxism, poststructuralism, and feminism. The book offers an accessible introduction to the main critical positions now represented in Shakespeare studies, enabling readers unfamiliar with critical theory to gain a purchase on the ideas.

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This book is a study of Michel Tournier's collection of short stories, Le Coq de bruyre, but it is also much more. Author Walter Redfern sees the stories as a microcosm of the whole fictional universe of Tournier, widely regarded as France's premier living writer.

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This study presents material from the Talmud and Midrash which have one characteristic in common: they reflect an anthropocentric, rather than a theocentric, view of the world.

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This collection by some of the leading scholars of Strauss' work is the first devoted to Strauss' thought regarding education. It seeks to address his conception of education as it applies to a range of his most important concepts, such as his views on the importance of revelation, his critique of modern democracy, and the importance of modern classical education. This book attempts to maintain traditional scholarly standards in the hope of approaching both Strauss and his work in a dispassionate and objective manner. It contains both biographical as well as scholarly chapters aimed first and foremost at understanding the corpus of Strauss' work and also his significance as an educational thinker.

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This study of the British Unitarians is the story of this groupOs thirty year war against the Omaster sin of the worldO_ American slavery. Focusing on the group known as the Garrisonians, the author examines their racial views, their attitudes toward the Civil War, their relations with the American antislavery movement, and the difficult problem of the relation between religious commitment and social activism.

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Mormon Women’s History: Beyond Biography demonstrates that the history and experience of Mormon women is central to the history of Mormonism and to histories of American religion, politics, and culture. Yet the study of Mormon women has mostly been confined to biographies, family histories, and women’s periodicals. The contributors to Mormon Women’s History engage the vast breadth of sources left by Mormon women—journals, diaries, letters, family histories, and periodicals as well as art, poetry, material culture, theological treatises, and genealogical records—to read between the lines, reconstruct connections, recover voices, reveal meanings, and recast stories.Mormon Women’s History presents women as incredibly inter-connected. Familial ties of kinship are multiplied and stretched through the practice and memory of polygamy, social ties of community are overlaid with ancestral ethnic connections and local congregational assignments, fictive ties are woven through shared interests and collective memories of violence and trauma. Conversion to a new faith community unites and exposes the differences among Native Americans, Yankees, and Scandinavians. Lived experiences of marriage, motherhood, death, mourning, and widowhood are played out within contexts of expulsion and exile, rape and violence, transnational immigration, establishing “civilization” in a wilderness, and missionizing both to new neighbors and far away peoples. Gender defines, limits, and opens opportunities for private expression, public discourse, and popular culture. Cultural prejudices collide with doctrinal imperatives against backdrops of changing social norms, emerging professional identities, and developing ritualization and sacralization of lived religion.The stories, experiences, and examples explored in Mormon Women’s History are neither comprehensive nor conclusive, but rather suggestive of the ways that Mormon women’s history can move beyond individual lives to enhance and inform larger historical narratives.

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This book examines the contradiction between Chinese perception of the missionary role and the missionariesO own perception of their role. It offers a critical assessment of the role of the missionaries in the country and sheds light on the magnitude of the problems inherent in cross-cultural encounters.

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Disenthralling Ourselves portrays contemporary Israel in a process of transition. Jewish-Israeli and Palestinian-Israeli communities share a nation-state divided by the separate truths of its conflicting fundamental narratives. This book considers ways of converting those separate and antagonistic narratives from fuel for conflict to seeds of change. Its purpose is to undo the convenient coherence of collective memory and master narratives through fostering a capacious moral imagination able to apprehend diverse, even contentious, stories and truths. Contemporary Israel functions as a case study in an in-depth and interdisciplinary exploration of conflict resolution, viewing Jewish-Israeli and Palestinian-Israeli documentary film, poetry, fiction, essays, memoir, peace initiatives, and other elements of collective narrative-building through a prism of three analogously themed Shakespearean plays. This comparative methodology is integrated with theoretical perspectives on reconciliation, resilience, critical reflection, and peace education in presenting concrete alternatives to the convenient comforts of the inimical master narratives that perpetuate what can now be seen as a hundred-year war. The readings offered in this book generate perspectives that can be adopted and adapted in relation to each other in the process of moving from a single static narrative of incessant warfare. The first section, 'Seeing in the Dark,' considers rhetoric and identity formation of cultures in transition. Its first half focuses on revenge cultures and reads Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice and Juliano Mer Khamis's documentary 'Arna's Children' in a fictive and documentary pairing of people stripped of all but revenge. Its second half considers rhetoric and Israeli identities in transition through the prism of Hamlet. Three genre-challenging authors represent Jewish-Israeli and Palestinian-Israeli narrative identity formation; Yaron Ezrahi, Emile Habiby,and Anton Shammas reflect a hybridity that emphasi

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Investigating the growth of Indology (the study of East Indian texts, literature, and culture) and the diffusion of this knowledge about ancient India within nineteenth-century Germany, this work contextualizes approaches to contact by historically grounding them in a contemporary history of German culture, education, and science. It answers the historical anomaly of why Germany had more nineteenth-century experts in the academic discipline of Indology than all other European powers combined. German interest in ancient India developed because it was useful for widely varying German projects, including Romanticism and nationalism. German Indologists made successful arguments about the cultural and intellectual relevance of ancient India for modern Germany, leaving an ambiguous legacy including a deeper appreciation of South Asian culture as well as scholarly justifications for the warlike image of a Swastika-bearing Aryan master race.

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